The Future of Serious Bible Study Is Free

What is it that makes us admire the teaching and writing of men like John Piper, J .I.

Packer, Jonathan Edwards, or name your favorite? At the core, they all have one thing in common.

Access to biblical language tools. Put simply, some of the foundational elements of all serious expositional preaching and teaching are the ability to study a text in the original language, look up a word in a lexicon, research a particular grammatical question, or understand where ancient witnesses differ in the representation of the canonical text.

All this until you can read and comprehend that text with complete clarity.

This is the bread and butter of exegesis, the staff in the hand of the shepherd, the hammer in the hand of the carpenter, and what

Luther described as the spark that lit the fire of the Reformation. Without serious biblical language resources,

Christians will always be second -handers, unable to build on a firm foundation, resigned to drawing from shallow wells, and vulnerable to false teaching.

Without the right tools, it's hard to build things that will last. Primitive tools may get the job done, but the work will compromise on quality.

So this is a plea, and a plan, to give the global church access to the same advanced tools that the

West enjoys, so that they may study the Bible at the same depth as the authors and leaders we love, and produce edifying resources for their people in their language.

This means that Americans don't need to translate more books written by their celebrity

Christian leaders, and then give them or sell them to the global church. That would be giving them fish instead of teaching them to fish.

Instead, the most strategic gift we can give is access to serious biblical language tools in the languages of those without them.

Serious biblical language tools include the following, lexicons, grammars, and text -critical information.

Of course, it goes without saying that in order to make use of these tools, people will need access to biblical language training, along with sufficient orientation on how to use them, such as training in the fundamentals of textual criticism.

And all of these tools should ideally be accessible and tagged within a free, open -source, universal app that works on mobile devices, and computers offline, and in a web browser.

So why don't these tools already exist in most major languages? Well, for centuries, knowledge of the biblical languages and advanced study tools were not a perceived need because, number one, everyone's global priority was limited to basic missions or evangelism.

And number two, teaching non -westerners Hebrew and Greek was hampered by an ineffective pedagogy, and a condescending belief that not all nationalities were mentally capable of learning.

Extreme poverty held back much of the majority world from the luxury of education and scholarship up until relatively recently.

All of these things have changed. Much of the world has been reached with the gospel.

Churches abound. Translations of the Bible are abundant compared to a hundred years ago.

People are hungry to grow in their faith, and grassroots Bible translation projects are springing up, which need serious tools to be successful.

Access to the internet and smartphones has also changed the situation. Advances in our understanding of second language acquisition have led to a better, more natural pedagogy that empowers all people to learn

Hebrew or Greek, regardless of their education, background, or personality. With free courses like Aleph with Beth and Alpha with Angela, thousands of people from nearly every country of the world are now learning the biblical languages with unprecedented success.

Technological advances have led to the superabundance of our current historical moment, which in turn has freed many people from subsistence living and given them the option of a joint education.

Because thousands of people in so many countries are now learning the biblical languages, soon they will be wanting to use their knowledge for deeper study of the

Bible, and for that, they'll need tools. Teaching someone Hebrew and then leaving them high and dry without basic tools, such as a lexicon, is like training a man to do surgery and then denying him access to a scalpel.

It doesn't matter how gifted, skilled, and knowledgeable he may be, he'll end up severely limited without this crucial tool.

Many today retain a paternalistic attitude toward minority language groups and claim that these people don't need to learn the biblical languages or other related disciplines, such as textual criticism, even for the sake of Bible translation.

But do these minority groups need and deserve to have local doctors and surgeons? Do they deserve to have their own hospitals?

Or should we tell them that they're too primitive and small to ever aspire to such training that would enable them to care for the health of their own people?

Should they content themselves to forever rely on outside experts and travel to other cities and countries when they need good health care?

So access to advanced biblical language knowledge and resources is similar to highly specialized medical and nutrition knowledge that empowers the best health care.

If people want that, we shouldn't deny them access. It could be argued that these biblical language tools are just as necessary to the spiritual health of the local churches as medical tools, like blood test equipment, are necessary to their physical health.

And it should go without saying that these resources are crucial to the health of all

Bible translation projects. So we want to take the initiative to provide the global church with these tools at zero cost and with no restrictions, starting with a reader's

Bible app. As students grow in their knowledge of Hebrew or Greek, they eventually need a way to read larger portions of the

Bible with training wheels. This is a crucial part of developing better fluency and gaining a more intuitive grasp of higher discourse features of these languages.

If every word in Hebrew and Greek is glossed in a language of wider communication, that data can be used to create a reading experience for students wherein they can quickly get a literal understanding of a word without having to interrupt their momentum by looking up a word.

This is different from the help they might get from an actual translation of the Bible in parallel, no matter how literal.

There are many elements in the Hebrew or Greek that are simply not translated in modern languages, or many times the word order of the translation is so different from the underlying original text that the student wastes valuable time and mental energy searching for what they need.

To give a simple example, one translation of Psalm 98 3 says, He remains loyal and faithful to the family of Israel.

Although this is a good translation that communicates the meaning of the sentence, it's unhelpful to the student of Hebrew who's trying to understand the way

Hebrew says it. The literal glosses would be as follows, Each cluster of words between dashes on the screen here represents one

Hebrew word. Once again, the way the translation renders the sentence is good, but it ultimately presents more of a distraction to the student rather than an aid.

Students will probably be confused by the present tense in that translation when they know that the

Hebrew verb is usually representative of a past tense or a completed action. Of course, there are good reasons for the translation's choice of present tense, but thinking through what those might be proves to be a distraction to students.

The other differences between the translation and the interlinear should be obvious such as the lack of the word remembered and house.

More literal translations like the NASB may be more akin to the original text in this example, but in other verses they won't.

We're aware of the many reverse interlinears and alignment projects that are going on right now, and they exist in multiple languages, which are

Bible translations that have been tagged to the underlying Hebrew text. But these are also an inadequate help for students who want to read larger portions of Hebrew with training wheels.

So an amazing core team of volunteer developers have been taking Hebrew Greek Bible dot online and converting it into an open source project on github that enables volunteers to translate glosses of the words in the

Hebrew Bible into their language. You can learn more about the project over at globalbibletools .com.

Once glosses for each Hebrew word are translated into a language, a digital original language reader's

Bible can be created. This allows students of Hebrew to simply touch a word they don't understand and instantly have a gloss pop up in their language.

This app already exists, is free, and works offline, and our plan is to create an improved version of it for both

Android and iOS. For years, many English -speaking students of Hebrew have benefited greatly from the

Reader's Hebrew Bible sold by Zondervan. However, this Bible is expensive, only provides

English glosses, and the glosses appear in footnotes at the bottom of the page. When forced to look through footnotes for the gloss information you need, the reading process is significantly less enjoyable and encounters more friction than necessary.

Precious momentum is lost, and students are easily distracted, whereas with an app like BART Bible, the student enjoys effortless access to the information they need as they practice reading.

And the advantages of this system are based on the best science of second language acquisition. Out of the world's 45 major languages, only

English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Hungarian, German, Russian, and Indonesian have a

Hebrew lexicon that we know of. It's about 20%. Massive languages like Hindi still have nothing.

There are more resources for Greek, but the need is still sizable. So how can we go about solving this problem?

Well, BDB and the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, LSJ, and Thayer for Greek, are some excellent lexicons that are freely available and open to translate into other languages right now.

Although some object that because of large differences between languages, the translation of lexicons is a bad idea, this is not true.

Much of the great knowledge of the original languages we have in English has been translated from German, including

Hallut and BDAG, which are two of the greatest Hebrew and Greek lexicons ever produced in English.

Translating a lexicon isn't harder than translating the Bible. It takes intelligence and a solid grasp of English, Hebrew, and the person's mother tongue.

This is not impossible. It's just challenging. Translating a lexicon will be hundreds of times faster than creating a lexicon from zero.

So our goal is to create an online web interface that can be used by non -programmers to work on the translation of lexicons.

The interface would help accelerate the process and maintain the formatting and metadata of the lexicon so that when finished it could easily be incorporated into an app or Bible study software.

If you're a programmer and you're interested in helping make this a reality, please contact us at the email in the description.

The five volumes of the Hebrew Old Testament text project are now open access in PDF form and we have been given permission by the publisher to transcribe, translate, and freely distribute it.

Also, the abbreviated version called the Preliminary and Interim Report has now been released under a

Creative Commons license by the United Bible Societies. These volumes represent some of the most valuable information ever compiled about textual variants in the

Hebrew Bible. They're a true goldmine that everyone should have access to and just like the lexicon interface, we want to create an interface that facilitates the translation of both of these resources so that volunteers from around the world can easily make the information available in the language of their people.

As for Greek, the Center for New Testament Restoration is already doing the work of making text critical information for the

Greek New Testament available to the masses freely. Finally, we at Aleph with Beth are actively developing a public domain

Hebrew grammar, which is being translated into several languages already by volunteers.

And there are others like Gesanius' reference grammar that are also in the public domain. For Greek, there are a handful of open licensed grammars that could be translated as well.

So our strategy is to prioritize the translation of all these tools into the gateway languages first, which will then open the door for the rest of the world's languages to follow.

The gateway languages are about 45 languages of wider communication that cover a hundred percent of the languages spoken collectively by the global church through patterns of multilingualism.

What this means is that because of globalization, even small obscure language groups have some people who are bilingual in one of these 45 bigger languages like Spanish, French, Indonesian, or Hindi.

All of this cannot be accomplished without a small army of personnel who believe in the vision and fully understand the value of these resources.

Some of them will be volunteers and some may need to be supported for a time by donations in order to do the work.

If you or someone you know are interested in participating in any of this work, either now or in the future, or if you or your church would like to fund this work in a particular language, please contact us at the email in the description.